Chapter Eighteen

The Edge of the World

There is one more story I should tell you.

When baby Iris and baby Lark were both finally home from the hospital, their parents were given strict instructions to keep them inside and isolated as much as possible until the end of April. There was some particular virus that flew around in the winter that caused most people to get bad colds but could be devastating for a premature baby’s lungs. Consider it like a quarantine, the doctors said.

So for five months the girls and their mom stayed inside, only leaving the house for their doctor appointments. Lark had to go more often because of a condition that meant sometimes her lungs and heart just stopped working for a little bit. So she was attached to a monitor that beeped every time she stopped breathing or her heart stopped beating.

“We were supposed to wait to see if your body would figure it out and reset itself,” their mom said when she told the story, “so when the alarm went off we were supposed to count to ten, then wake Lark up.”

“What do you mean, wake her up?” Iris asked.

“Oh, well. Gently at first. Like, rubbing her face. And if that didn’t work, maybe squeeze her arm.”

“And what if none of it worked?”

“Then . . . we were supposed to do CPR.”

“How do you do CPR on a baby?” Iris asked.

“Very carefully,” her father said.

Their father could never manage to wait the full ten beeps before waking Lark up. “I made it to four once, though,” he told them proudly.

The alarm used to go off all the time. The wires got crossed or the leads fell off and the thing would start beeping and Iris—herself a fully functioning something-is-wrong-with-Lark alarm—would shriek and both parents would run to their bedroom and find the machine broken but Lark was fine and eyeing them curiously, as if making scientific deductions about the effects of repeated loud beeping noises on fully grown humans.

Everyone wanted to come over and see the new babies, and no one seemed to believe that the doctors’ warnings could be legitimate. Oh, I just have a little cough, they’d say. You guys are so paranoid!

Their dad escorted his own aunt out of the house after she sneezed on Lark and insisted it was just allergies.

“It was a long winter,” their mom said.

When the girls were two, that cold virus hit and got into their delicate lungs and the girls began to cough and wheeze, and they were both whisked off to the emergency room. There, a nice doctor with long, curly brown hair listened to their lungs and gave them each a small heating pad shaped like an animal—Iris a gray bunny, Lark a calico cat. Two hours later Iris and the bunny (named Bunny) were sent home, but Lark and the cat (named Esmeralda) were admitted and kept overnight. It happened again when they were four—each girl got a mask strapped about her nose and mouth and inhaled some medication that tasted like tinfoil. And Lark was admitted again, bringing Esmeralda with her.

Iris didn’t remember much of any of this, though she knew that Great-Aunt Carol used to talk a lot about how her allergies flared up in winter. Iris remembered her parents standing over Lark with a stopwatch counting her breaths—they must have done it for her, too, but she had no memory of that. And she remembered the emptiness of their room when Lark was in the hospital overnight, of crawling up into the top bunk to go to bed and feeling like without Lark there on the bottom it might just float away. And the painfully barren feeling of a Larkless house, as if her sister had just disappeared into thin air. She remembered that whenever she got a cold, her parents would splash disinfectant everywhere. Be so careful not to give it to your sister. She remembered that when Lark was at the hospital, one parent was always home with her, and Dad (or Mom) would sit on the couch with Iris and they would read books or watch movies and Mom (or Dad) would tell her that her sister just needed a little help getting better, but she would come home so soon.

By the time the girls were in elementary school, colds were just colds, and they could all go around sniffling without getting doused in disinfectant.

Until they were eight.

They both got the cold—really, the whole second grade had it. The girls stayed home from school for three days, sleeping and reading and playing board games and trailing Kleenex everywhere. Their mom doled out spoonfuls of orange medicine and sympathy. On day four, they both went back to school a little sniffly, but no cough.

Then that evening Lark complained that her head felt like it was going to explode. She had an impossible fever and could not look at lights and could not touch her chin to her chest, and these were emergency symptoms and required her dad packing Lark up in the night and taking her to the hospital while Iris and her mom waited at home.

And then Lark wasn’t coming home; she was staying there. The emergency symptoms belonged to an actual emergency, and one that would not be over soon.

They’d left for the hospital so quickly they’d forgotten Esmeralda, and on the morning of the first day Iris took the stuffed cat from her sister’s bunk in order to give it to her mom to take to the hospital.

But she squeezed it to her chest and it smelled like Lark. So she grabbed Bunny and gave it to her mom to bring to Lark.

Two days came and went and Lark was still not back. They did not know when she would be home. A dark shadow circled around their house and held everyone tightly. Their parents spoke in bright words to Iris, as if the shadow weren’t there, but it was clear that something terrible had wrapped its slithering way around them and begun to squeeze.

It was meningitis, caused by an infection that had slipped in while her body was busy with the cold, like the shadow that had slipped into their house while no one was looking.

Meningitis was an inflammation of the brain, caused by either a virus or an infection. It could be fatal. No one had ever explained any of that to Iris, though; she’d had to look it all up herself.

It was the end of the world. You always know when it’s the end of the world, no matter how bright people try to make their words. Iris knew. And she did not understand why her parents were pretending it wasn’t. Did they know the truth and were they keeping it from her, or did they just not see it?

And which was worse?

What do you do when the world is ending and the adults are acting like it’s not happening?

They sent Iris back to school, and she tucked the stuffed cat in her backpack to keep her company all day.

Day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6. No, you cannot visit. I’m so sorry.

Day 7, day 8, day 9.

Her mom would be at the hospital during the day, her dad at night. Before he left he’d sit on the bottom bunk with Iris (he did not trust the top bunk) and tell her stories. Iris would listen, clutching the stuffed cat close.

One night her dad told her the story of the Pied Piper, a musician who was called into the town of Hamelin to rid it of a snake infestation. The piper played his pipe and led all the snakes away, but when he asked for payment, the townspeople refused. So he played his pipe and led all the children of Hamelin away. No one ever saw them again.

That night Iris had a nightmare of a townful of children disappearing into thin air—everyone but her. She ran through empty houses calling for her friends, but no one answered. They were all gone.

The nightmare warped, got worse. The Pied Piper played his pipe and all the children marched out of the town and off the edge of the world. Sometimes Iris marched with them; sometimes she could only watch; sometimes she knew what was coming and couldn’t do anything to stop it; sometimes the edge just came. No matter what, she woke up terrified.

It was not the only nightmare. From the night Lark was rushed off to the hospital, Iris had dreams of robbers in black stocking caps and masks and black-and-white striped shirts scaling the walls of her house and climbing in the windows, of a fire blazing through the house quicker than they could run, of monsters under the bed and in the closet and just outside the door, of long dark slithering things hissing at her. She dreamed of vampires, of zombies, of werewolves in the bright full moon, of real wolves circling and baring their teeth, of monstrous birds, of bone-fingered witches reaching for her, of demons slipping under her skin and taking hold of her.

And then Lark came home, clutching Bunny close.

It was over.

She would be fine.

But she looked as if something had tried to sip the life from her. It wasn’t a monster; Iris knew that. It was just biology.

Because things like that happen. Sometimes the world is monstrous. Sometimes, for whatever reason, an infection slips under your skin and takes hold.

Wash your hands. Cover your cough. Keep your hands away from your eyes and mouth. Douse yourself and people near you in sanitizer. Don’t share food. Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. Don’t go outside with wet hair. Get lots of sleep.

These things are supposed to protect you. Except sometimes they aren’t enough, and that is when the monsters come.

Memory tells us funny lies sometimes. Iris remembers her nightmares as a fact of her childhood, can’t remember a time without having them, a time where falling asleep at night didn’t feel like jumping into a pit of rattlesnakes.

But it’s not true. These nightmares started the night Lark went to the hospital.

And when Lark came home, Iris’s nightmares did not stop, though her sister was keeping the bottom bunk weighted down where it was supposed to be, and one night in the middle of a dream where every child disappeared from the school but her, she heard the sound of Lark climbing up the bunk-bed ladder.

Iris told her the story of the Pied Piper and the children of Hamelin, and how they just walked out of town and never came back again.

So Lark rewove the story. “But when they got to the edge of the world,” she whispered in Iris’s ear, “that’s when they grew wings and flew away. The Pied Piper could only watch. The children couldn’t go home again, but they lived in the sky and the birds kept watch over them. The end.”

It was a good story. Maybe it was better to have wings and hang out with the birds than to be in a town with people who’d cheat someone out of money. Maybe the kids would have grown up to be that sort of people too, but now the birds would help them be different.

The next night when Iris awoke from a nightmare—vampires, this time—Lark slipped into her bed and collected the pieces of the dream and reshaped them: that swarm of vampires that menaced her were all vegetarians, no more dangerous than Bunnicula.

And when the sun came up Lark told her about all the ways an ordinary girl could defeat a vampire.

They remember Lark’s bestiary as just something that happened too. It was Lark—of course she had her own monster book.

But it didn’t just happen. Lark told Iris stories, and then at some point Lark started drawing pictures, and then she wrote out facts about each monster, and soon she was collecting them all into a book—a monster bestiary.

“We need this,” Lark had said. “We’re the girls who defeat the monsters.”

So it was Lark who named all the monsters for Iris, gave them shape and form and powers, and, most importantly, gave them weaknesses. And once you can look at a monster head-on, once you know the sound it makes, the precise threat it poses, the way it can be defeated, then you can look straight into the dark places and not be so afraid.

And at night, sometimes, your sister crawls into the top bunk with you, bringing Esmeralda, and you sleep tucked in with each other.

Sometimes that, alone, keeps the monsters away.